Because we aren't pigeons

At the moment I'm reading Alfie Kohn's Unconditional Parenting. Kohn claims that the vast majority of current parenting books focus almost entirely on controlling children's behavior through some combination of sticks and carrots, without trying to understand the emotional states underlying a child's actions. In other words, current parenting advice is behavioralist.

I didn't know, for instance, that "time out" as a strategy comes from an article published by one of Skinner's colleagues in 1958, titled "Control of Behavior in Chimpanzees and Pigeons by Time-out from Positive Reinforcement."

In a previous post I touched on arguments that punishments and rewards are not actually that effective. In Unconditional Parenting Kohn writes (p. 33):

Intrinsic motivation basically means you like what you're doing for its own sake, whereas extrinsic motivation means you do something as a means to an end--in order to get a reward or avoid a punishment....

What I want to emphasize is that extrinsic motivation is likely to erode intrinsic motivation. As extrinsic goes up, intrinsic tends to come down. The more that people are rewarded for doing something, the more likely they are to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.... [T]hat basic proposition has been proven by literally scores of studies with people of different ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds--and with a variety of different tasks and rewards.

Now, I admit, I am not above using bribes. I had fantastic success with them when potty training A (took like two weeks, including weaning her off the bribes). But I've also tried to set up reward systems only to find that within two or three days the bribe is no longer sufficient to induce her to (say) get dressed without being nagged. [For some reason, both my children despise clothing. Dana Carvey says he had to negotiate a daily "naked time" with his kids-- I can relate!]

I haven't used these methods very often, but in A's case it was just a pointless exercise. Worse, using bribes produced an "Oh yeah? And what are you gonna give me if I do?" attitude. I imagine that had I used punishments, those would have produced the converse attitude, namely "And what are you gonna do if I don't?" In other words, using these "extrinsic" motivators turns into a spiral of bribes and threats, in my experience.

Giving a child a reward or heaping on praise carries with it the implication that the task they just accomplished is an unpleasant one. It teaches them also that we have a system of tit-for-tat economics, even in our closest personal relationships; this is antithetical to generosity. Behavioralist methods necessarily draw our focus to the behavior, rather than to the state of mind, which ultimately treats the symptoms and not the causes. And then, to top all that off, it doesn't even work. A child paid to get good grades has poorer academic achievement, according to Kohn, then one who is not paid.

Consider this from John Gatto:

The schools we've allowed to develop can't work to teach nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone's life, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, of carrots and sticks. Working for official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination; these have no connection with education - they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not freedom.

How do kids in formal schools so often lose their love of learning? Maybe it's because they're taught for 13 years that learning is so unpleasant that only through the threat of disciplinary action or being held back, or the bribe of good grades or favors, can anyone expect them to undergo an education. Kids are admonished to stay in school on the basis of earnings potential, sending the message that short-term sacrifice (because learning involves suffering) will pay off (literally) in the long term. There has to be a better way than using methods that were developed on pigeons, rats, and dogs. But the schools, already possessed of the fear that a child left to its own devices will prefer not to learn anything, ever, or that kids not warehoused and trained to behave will wreak havoc and chaos in the community, is well prepared to believe that inducements-- carrots and sticks-- are entirely necessary. That if you remove these devices, the school cannot function. And so we use the modified pigeon method, and demean education in the eyes of the students.

My mom taught writing classes at a 4-year university, a few years back. She once overheard a student say something that I fear sums it up for too many students. "Man," he said, "I can't wait till I graduate and I never have to learn anything again."